23 Trader Joe's Coffee, Ranked Worst To Best

Trader Joe's may be best known for its extensive frozen food section and affordable wine and cheese offerings. However, its growing aisle of coffees has remained an under-the-radar selection, perhaps due to the sometimes inscrutable variables between beans.

With coffees spanning several roasts, origins, and even flavoring, the Trader Joe's coffee collection occupies a substantial strip of each store's real estate. And though the chain brought back the pre-pandemic tradition of storewide sanctioned sampling and pairing, the coffee stations located in the rear of each TJ's remain silent as of late 2022. Until that changes, taking home a pound (or two) of their various coffees is the only way to test drive the dizzying amount of coffee options the store offers.

To give you a head start, we piled an armload of Trader Joe's year-round coffee selections (they also offer pumpkin spice and gingerbread-infused grounds during the holiday seasons) into our red plastic carts. Taking them all home to make our daily pour-overs, we tested the best and worst of Trader Joe's disparate coffee options for you. In the way of coffee beans, we bought everything we could find in whole bean format and ground those coarsely in a burr grinder to make a one-serving French press. For the pre-ground stuff, we made a single-cup pot of each in a drip brewer. The pre-made cold brews were both poured over ice and finally, the one instant coffee we tried was made according to the bottle's instructions.

We don't know who the intended audience is for Trader Joe's French Roast. A cup of this ground coffee brews so densely it looks like a vat of paint while sitting in a mug. On the tongue, it crashes onto the palate, shatters any potential to enjoy a relaxing morning routine, and tastes and smells like an old cigar box. 

Thick and menthol-like, we're guessing French Roast ground's core audience is folks who take their coffee with not only a dollop of cream and sugar but a heaping glug of flavorings, whip, and even sprinkles. To say this is by far Trader Joe's worst offender doesn't fully encapsulate how dismal it is. If you dare take a bag home, also grab a case of Trader Joe's Sparkling Water to cleanse your palate.

Believe us when we say: We were really, really rooting for this cold brew concentrate to knock our socks off. We wanted it to be the perfect solution to our lazy, cold-brew-making-averse selves. But sadly, she disappointed.

The thing we liked the least about this concentrate was how difficult it was to find a balance. The bottle recommends mixing one part concentrate with two parts water or milk. But upon following these directions, we found every time — regardless of the liquid used to dilute — that the coffee was way too weak. Not only was it not strong enough, but it was almost devoid of flavor, despite of the concentrate's French roast darkness. After a few cups, we decided that a ratio of 2:1 coffee to water was much better, but even then, still a little weak. That leads us to believe that this is a pretty weak concentrate and easy to consume quite quickly. So, at that point, why wouldn't we just buy ready-to-drink cold brew?

Upon opening the tin of Organic Sumatra coffee beans, we spied red flags all over the place. The beans appear to be roasted so dark they were almost black and covered in the oily glaze we balk at. Once ground and awaiting hot water, the deep, dark grinds refuse to bloom, and the water runs too quickly through the coffee. This created an overly dark, syrupy cup that tasted solely bitter. 

Even the mouthfeel of the coffee translates weighty and intrusive, yet dull. Curiously, the packaging nudges its reader to enjoy a mug of Sumatra Coffee "after a savory meal." This seems like Trader Joe's is trying to find a positive quality in a subpar can of coffee by creating a circumstance their coffee drinker would rarely find themselves in. While we admit that we're not sure if a salty meal would offset how unpalatable we find Trader Joe's Sumatra, we highly suspect the pairing advice to be a cleverly planted red herring.

What we first noticed about Trader Joe's Bolivia Blend was how oily the beans looked, slippery to the touch, and slightly ashy in their aroma. Sourced from several (though the bag doesn't specify) family farms "between the peak of the Andes and the Amazon Basin," the tin blends both medium and dark roasts but smells aggressively dark and brews into a deep color as well. Incredibly bitter and flat at the same time, the package boasts of a caramel note we couldn't detect over the bitter wipe-out of over-roasted beans. 

Comprised entirely of the world's most grown coffee beans, Arabica, the medium to small beans are taken way past the point of being sippable. This Bolivia Blend yearns for a tablespoon or two of creamer or oat milk to mellow out the bitter, acidic taste that otherwise sticks around on your tongue long after sipping.

We have to admit that dark-roasted coffee isn't typically our thing, so we side-eyed the bag of Joe's Dark ground coffee beans as we heated up the kettle. As suspected, the grounds refused to bloom into the coffee fluff we like to see while making a pour-over coffee with our trusted Chemex, and the hot water slipped a little too quickly through the grasp of the coffee grounds. 

Though our cup of this dark roast wasn't an experience we yearn to repeat, it wasn't as offensive to the taste buds as we anticipated. Smelling and tasting both extremely dark baking chocolate, the dark roast lacks dimension but boasts none of the acidic secondary notes we initially feared. With a generous helping of sugar, the edge of bitterness was massaged into an espresso-like cup of coffee that would pair well with a slice of German chocolate cake or another ultra-rich dessert.

Somewhat of a novice to decaf coffee and its appeal, we understand the demand for a noncaffeinated coffee option from every purveyor of the real thing. From what we've (almost entirely accidentally tasted) of decaffeinated coffee in the past, Trader Joe's rendition of the ground beans are par-for-the-course. While we didn't wish to keep sipping our mug of decaf, we don't see TJ's decaf to be any more or less loathsome than the average decaf.  

The taste was astringently sour on the first sip, then settled into a sharp approximation of our morning beverage of choice. That said, while brewing, the decaf ground beans give off a toasted bread aroma we appreciated in our kitchen. At the very least, this bag supplied us with a coffee-scented diffuser for the day.

After what seemed like a marathon of darkly roasted coffees, we were relieved to heat up a medium-roasted mug. What met us was a more understated cup of coffee good enough to drink on its own and without any clingy, bombastic notes. Smelling slightly citrusy, Joe's Medium Roast has enough acidity to balance out the more shadowy notes of earth while sashaying any bitter quality the beans could've taken on if roasted any further. 

This is the kind of coffee we imagine sitting in an ad agency's office pot. It is light enough to sip on mindlessly all day while puttering around at a desk and didn't leave us queasy or jittered. Yes, Joe's Medium Roast misses the opportunity to hatch its own sense of personality or charm. Still, by avoiding any of the major pitfalls, the coffee sits near the center of our list anyway.

This is a coffee for when you feel like soaking in a nostalgic bath bomb of your childhood. Just opening the bag unleashes a strong vanilla smell reminiscent of the Maxwell House International Coffee tins we enjoyed as adolescents. Medium roasted with Arabica beans that are then dressed up with French vanilla flavor oil (suspiciously not vanilla beans or extract), we know this bag is a far cry from a serious coffee. However, it serves a purpose none of the others do by leaning into a guilty pleasure. 

Either way, we respect the commitment to an era of coffee long since past with this throwback roast that smells like our imagination's version of Central Perk. It certainly brought us back to our first memories of coffee discovery. 

The sole light roast in the entirety of Trader Joe's library of coffees, Joe Light Roast is gentle on the nose and tastes like a decent diner coffee — though it lacks depth and dimension but as a trade-off. The bag honestly describes the ground coffee as "nothing fancy," which is precisely the lane where Trader Joe's shines. Like its mango strips and trail mix, the store's light roast coffee is an ideal coffee to serve alongside a big table of food or to take camping. 

Nothing about it will bowl you over, but it also knows its place and doesn't insert itself where it doesn't belong. Made entirely of Arabica beans, Trader Joe's light roast builds on the back of the palette to a slightly astringent tinge that dissipates with the presence of fatty foods.

We've found that gravitating toward breakfast blends pays off when shopping for easy-drinking, no-frills grocery store coffee. True to form, Trader Joe's rendition of the almost obligatory blend comes through.  

This one is substantially less oily than the majority of what haunts the stock on TJ's coffee shelves. And yet, the blend smells like an elevated Folgers or like waking up at your in-law's house and being welcomed in the morning to a pot of coffee that's been sitting in the pot since 6 a.m. Though a little bitter on the top-tasting notes, especially for a lighter-roasted coffee, this organic brew immediately took hold of our systems and lit us up for the day. Generic as it may be, the medium roasted beans are perfect for a big breakfast party and smooth enough to be drunk black. 

Even our check-out clerk pointed to Summer Camp as her favorite of all Trader Joe's coffees. Unlike most items at Trader Joe's, Summer Camp beans can be easily traced back to Campfire, a Tacoma-based, Black-owned coffee roaster. Both potent and subtle, Campfire tastes earthy with notes of forest floor and wet wood. Though the beans are slightly past the roasting point we prefer, the medium-dark coffee avoids any bitter, acrid, sour notes the other coffees cannot help but carry. 

Plus, while most of the beans represented at Trader Joe's are overwhelmingly Arabica, the Chiapas are more delicate and less bombastic on the palate. It's easily the best bag in the store. However, at about $15, we only foresee plopping another bag of Campfire into our Trader Joe's cart when trying to accomplish a single-destination shopping trip or finding ourselves in an unfamiliar town with limited coffee options. Otherwise, you can take home a bag of freshly roasted coffee from a local roaster (or Campfire themselves in the Tacoma area) for the same price.

In our methodology for taste testing a variety of coffees from Trader Joe's, we employed a systematic approach to ensure consistency and fairness in evaluating each product. We did our best to find all available coffees in whole bean format, then ground them coarsely in a conical burr grinder to maintain uniformity, and finally brewed them in a French press using a ratio of 13:1 water to coffee by weight in grams.

For the pre-ground coffees, we brewed single-cup pots using a drip brewer to simulate what we figured might be one of the most common household brewing practices. We used a 15:1 ratio of coffee to water for each batch in our drip brewer. The two pre-made cold brews were poured over ice before being drunk. The concentrate was diluted according to package instructions. Our only instant coffee was made according to the package instructions.

Each coffee was assessed based on key criteria, including flavor profile, aroma, body, acidity, and overall quality. Tasting sessions were conducted in a controlled environment to minimize external influences on perception. By this, we mean that nothing was eaten or drunk (besides water) in between tastings. Each coffee was tasted on its own first before additives (if any) were added.